Why don't the individual stars mean anything anymore?
I actually really liked that in the top right it explained that 5 stars meant "must see" and 1 star meant "awful". PLEASE DO NOT GET RID OF THIS.
A version of this feature has been released with the latest movielens update. This shows up as a small tool-tip if you hover over the rating interface.
Interested to hear what people think of this version of this feature.
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Anonymous commented
I personally use the scale. But I think the scale is useful in that it more or less standardises ratings.
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Leon commented
I use the rating legend. For me a "3" is an inoffensive and bland movie. Anything less I regret watching. Anything more I'm glad I saw.
It's a useful prompt to help people avoid bottoming out their ratings. I.e. when people start using the site they might give a bland movie "1" star and find there's not much lower they can go when they're rating something they truly hated. -
AJ commented
I never found them very useful. I have my own way of thinking about what the ratings mean, that don't correspond to those terms. I actually scale all of my ratings to 1-10 in my head.
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Randy commented
I love the legend, too. I almost always refer to it when rating a movie. Would love to see it stick around.
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anonymous commented
I absolutely find the legend helpful. I use it when I rate and evaluate. It is essential for me.
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Anthony Mark Mercuri commented
I have to disagree with the OP. "Must see", etc. are arbitrary, useless descriptors to me. Just a waste of space. It realls seems like an obvious concept to me, so that the number of stars you give something stands for itself. More stars = more gooder.
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And now we've made this harder by introducing a ratings widget where there is no click target for 0 stars. I agree that zero stars is a more natural minimum.
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Anonymous commented
I never understood why the minimum is 1/2 star instead of 0. I rate films as well in Criticker that has a 0-100 scale and I have always wondered what I should rate if I ever find a movie so horrible that deserves the minimum vote.